The present invention relates to an arrangement pertaining to aircraft seats.
A large number of flights of long duration are carried out daily throughout the world, i.e. flights involving flight times in excess of six hours. Although most passengers are able to sit comfortably in a seat during these flights, a large number feel the need to stretch out after about 3-4 hours, preferably in lying position and to fall asleep. However, this is not possible in the majority of cases, except for those companies that have provided spacious first-class facilities, The cost of a first-class ticket, however, is too high for many travellers, and consequently not all passengers that would like to avail themselves of the possibility of sleeping more easily on an aircraft do not have this possibility in practice. Neither do present-day aircraft have sufficient space to include such a facility for all passengers on board, since sleeping places require much more room than the typical seats in business class and economy class on aircraft.
Accordingly, an object of the present invention is to provide an arrangement which enables bed structures to be provided in the spaces allocated to present-day aircraft seats.
The object of the invention is achieved by exploiting the vertical space above the aircraft seat, and by constructing the seat so that it can be brought to an arrangement in which several passengers can lie one above the other.
According to the present invention, the seats in a row of mutually juxtaposed seats are constructed to enable adjacent seat parts to be raised or lowered to form a long and essentially continuous bed surface, so that an additional surface, which is normally located beneath the seat cushions or suspended from the ceiling, provides an additional bed surface.
According to one further embodiment of the invention, the backrests of the seats can be swung up and possibly also raised, so as to form together another bed surface.
With aircraft seats in accordance with the present invention disposed in the centre section, another arrangement relating to aircraft seats in accordance with another invention for which an application for patent was filed at the same time as the present application, can be used for seat rows along the outer edges of the aircraft cabin, i.e. the window seats, although the invention can also be applied in respect of the rows at the windows provided that some displacement can be achieved in conjunction with raising or lowering the seat parts. The invention thus provides proper sleeping places for the majority of passengers, not only in first-class accommodation but also in business class and economy class accommodations.